Amy B.H. Greenwell

Amy Beatrice Holdsworth Greenwell was one of
the 23 grandchildren of Henry Nicholas Greenwell,
a soldier-turned-merchant who arrived in Hawai’i
in the 1850s.

Despite a series of rough starts,
Henry left his family a 36,000 acre legacy
when he died, a small portion of which eventually
passed on to Amy.

An observant and intelligent student, Amy was
a member of Gamma Phi Beta at Stanford University,
class of 1942. She always had a passion for Hawaiian
studies, but interrupted her education to serve
as a Red Cross Nurse at Queen’s Hospital during
WWII.

After the war she traveled to New York,
where she worked with Otto Degener at New
York Botanical Gardens on one of the authoritative
volumes on Hawaiian plants, Flora Hawaiiensis.

Amy Greenwell had a great appreciation for both
the natural environment and Hawaiian culture.
On her return to Hawai‘i in 1947 she started
working closely with Bishop Museum and its archeological
projects.

On one of her expeditions in 1953 she
discovered some ancient fishhooks at Ka
Lae and in doing so brought the now-famous Pu‘u
Ali‘i sand dune site to the attention of professional
archeologists. This site led to the discovery
of some 1,600 fish hooks of 65 varieties.These fish hooks were carbon-dated to 950 A.D.
making them the earliest known artifacts
in Hawai’i at the time. In addition, Amy
did archeological and botanical surveys
for such significant sites as Pu‘uhonua o Hōnaunau
and Lapakahi.

Despite her archeological accomplishments, Amy
Greenwell is best known as a botanist. Over her
lifetime she wrote many articles on both native
and other tropical plants. These include Taro
– With Special Reference to its Culture and Uses
in Hawaii, Rose Growing in Hawai’i, and Hawaiian
Violets.

In her later life she lived at
her 15-acre Kealakekua property, which
she slowly transformed into a “pre-Cookian” garden,
planting scores of native and Polynesian-introduced
plants among intact remnants of Hawaiian agricultural
formations.In her free time Amy dabbled in other sciences
such as meteorology and speleology. On these
subjects she wrote various articles and even
gave regular radio broadcasts. She reported surface
weather and UAP, or unusual aerial phenomena,
to the National Weather Service for over
twenty years. In addition to all that, she bred
pure breed pug dogs.

When she died in 1974 at the age of 53, Amy
Greenwell left her Kealakekua property to Bishop
Museum as an educational and cultural resource.
The goal was to create an experience in which
visitors and locals alike could revisit the Hawaiian
past and explore the environmental splendors
of ancient Hawai‘i.

Bishop Museum has expanded
on Amy’s initial efforts to encompass over
200 native plant species. Many of these are on
the endangered species list, and several are
virtually extinct in the wild.